Hellraiser (20th Anniversary Edition) DVDReview

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Do we show mercy to this DVD release, or tear its soul apart?

By Christopher Monfette

What's your pleasure, Mr. Cotton? asks the nameless vendor, dropping a cube of sugar into his mid-morning tea. Across the table, a white-shirted man sweats in the extreme heat of the Pacific. A puzzling, six-sided trinket sits like a weapon between them.

"The box," replies the man, first setting down a small pile of bills. Then another. He slides them across the table - an ominous transaction.

"Take it," says the vendor as the man rises with the cube. "It's yours."

A beat; a wry, unseen smile.

"It always was."

This simple exchange begins one of the most memorable horror films of the past several decades - not simply because of its nameless, aesthetically-dynamic villain (later to be named Pinhead by fans), but because of its ruthlessly bleak and gut-wrenchingly horrific view of the human condition. Hellraiser, like its literary namesake The Hellbound Heart, is a film about lust&#Array;for power, for pleasure, for life and love&#Array;and the terrible, blood-soaked price that the human heart will pay to fulfill its desires.

The set-up is soap-opera simple:

Julia's married to Larry, but once had a tryst with his brother Frank. Kirsty is Larry's daughter and Frank once lusted for Kirsty. Frank, who we spied purchasing the puzzlebox at the film's opening, solves the riddle and is sent into the hellish company of Pinhead and his demonic Cenobites. Now Frank's back (only without his flesh) in a conspiracy with Julia to hijack Larry's skin. And now it's up to Kirsty to keep all Hell from breaking loose.

There is an incredible and complex weaving of diverse elements here - hardcore horror and over-sexed, family melodrama; Hitchcockian thriller and high-concept, iconoclastic villainy. But where Hellraiser succeeds is in its more subtle implications. There is as much unspoken as spoken within this unsettling concept; there are spaces left for the viewer to fill - open voids pending imagination. The implication of Hell suggests a much more terrifying reality; the blank face of Pinhead suggests some boredom at his bloody profession and a deeper fascination at human pathos, playing with flesh and bone like pieces of a broken toy.

For what is essentially - at its rawest roots - a haunted house film, there's a philosophy to Hellraiser uncommon in lesser horror films. It aspires to be more than a man in a mask and a few screaming teenagers. It is a film about pleasures and how obsessively we seek them - - about how the price tag for what we want - openly or secretly -- too often says simply, "Hell." And perhaps it is over-thinking to wonder if the film continues to increase in resonance as we evolve into a culture of outstretched hands who believe that what we can have, we should have. Maybe it's over-thinking to wonder if the violence and viscera isn't employed to remind us that the only thing we truly possess - and the only thing that can truly be taken away -- is our own skin. Maybe that's over-thinking, but then again, maybe it's not.